From the Kadist Art Foundation web site: 

Resulting from his three-month residency at Kadist Art Foundation, Flies Prefer Yellow is the North American debut exhibition of Singapore-based artist, Robert Zhao Renhui (b. 1983). Featuring installation and photographic works, the exhibition explores boundaries, systems, neuroses, and control through the artist’s encounters with one of the most inconspicuous insect species on earth–flies. Despite their ubiquity and adaptability (more than 145,000 species exist), flies remain nearly invisible to many humans. This dismissive outlook is attributed less to visual perception, and more to a psychological predisposition towards the insect’s lack of purpose—a manufactured negligence that determines what we see and what we do not. Rendering the unseen visible, and the ignored critical, this multidisciplinary exhibition amplifies the intersections of insect and human, natural and urbanized environments, and entomology and art practice.

During his residency, Zhao made multiple visits to the Sacramento insect lab of Dr. Martin Hauser, Senior Insect Biosystematist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture (and longtime acquaintance of the artist’s). Inspired by Hauser’s scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy, Zhao began observing and cataloguing insects. Ranging from beetle-tracking within the urban core of San Francisco, to collecting the various insect carcasses from his windshield during road trips, the artist began accumulating observations about the indigenous insects, and in particular, the flies he encountered. In addition to the flies themselves, Zhao’s curiosity extends to the various traps and methods humans use to rid themselves of the pests.

The exhibition’s title, Flies Prefer Yellow, on the one hand refers to the artist’s affectionate imagination through its anthropopathic tone, implying a desire to be friendly with the insects. On the other hand, the preference is actually a statistical observation as most commercial flytraps are produced in the color yellow. Through the lens of flies, the exhibition invites critical reflection on human’s paradoxical relationships with animals and our organic world.

Through this collision with art, the insect world, long suppressed and diminished by the congestion and monumentality of urban life, is revealed in the full glory of its contradictions: the fly is both friend and foe, beautiful and repellant, known, yet never fully described. Through languages of humor, repetition, contradiction and juxtaposition, Zhao’s practice negotiates the process of image making and the proximity of vision that continue to blur lines between objective documentation and fictional narrative.

On the evening of the opening reception, November 19 6-9pm, Dr. Martin Hauser will join Zhao and Xiaoyu Weng in conversation within a pop-up laboratory of his scientific materials and specimens. Monica Martinez, of Don Bugito, will serve edible insect appetizers alongside a special insect cocktail by Helena Keeffe.

ROBERT ZHAO RENHUI: FLIES PREFER YELLOW

WEDNESDAY, 19 NOVEMBER, 2014 – SATURDAY, 10 JANUARY, 2015

Opening Reception: November 19, 6-9pm

Exhibition Dates: November 19 – January 10 

Kadist Art Foundation

3925 20th St. San Francisco, CA 94111

By Nita Lelyveld

At the Jonathan Club downtown, not everyone took it well when an infrequently used paddle tennis court on a fifth-floor roof was sacrificed to gem lettuce, swiss chard and microgreens.

Executive chef Jason McClain, of course, was thrilled. His father, a retired landscape architect, flew in from Alabama to build the garden, installing neat rows of galvanized horse troughs in which vegetables and herbs now grow.

Club members walking on the artificial turf track nearby pass tubs filled with citrus and fruit trees. The dinner menu lists “our home-grown items”: broccolini, baby carrots, yuzu, blueberries, figs, snap peas and heirloom tomatoes.

“I mean, you cut a tomato and it’s like a real tomato. The juice runs down your arm. It’s never been refrigerated,” McClain, dressed in crisp fresh chef’s whites, said Tuesday morning to a busload of visitors on a daylong tour of urban agriculture and local food systems.

“It’s just magical. You’re in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. It’s really great at 5 o’clock, when the traffic’s going and you hear the obscenities, and I’m up here snipping arugula.”

The visitors — who included growers, urban policymakers, consultants, entrepreneurs and representatives of nonprofits — wandered around the vegetable beds and asked questions as they got a taste of the garden.

Waiters served a drink called an Autumn Escape, featuring garden-grown rosemary, fresh pressed pineapple, cinnamon, lime and club soda, and offered spoon-size tastes of lemon verbena crème caramel and dainty Warren pear financiers, decorated with leaves of just-picked arugula.

A serious, note-taking group, the visitors were interested in the practical ins and outs: That the garden yields as much as $150,000 worth of produce every year. That it cost about $40,000 to build. That it provides work for a local urban farming venture called Farmscape Gardens, whose farmers plant the Jonathan Club’s seeds, compost the beds and rotate the crops.

The tour was organized by Seedstock, a Los Angeles-based company that offers consulting services and disseminates information about sustainable food projects. It hosts an annual conference on sustainable agriculture, which begins Wednesday at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. This year’s theme is “Reintegrating Agriculture: Local Food Systems and the Future of Cities.”

As they left the 120-year-old private club and headed back to the bus, tour members talked about what they had seen. Didn’t the galvanized tubs burn up in summer? Did that tree really produce edible olives?

Niki Mazaroli, program officer at the Leichtag Foundation in Encinitas, said one of her foundation’s aims is to help struggling people reach self-sufficiency. She said she hoped Jonathan Club members with means might look at the garden there and get inspired to invest in the sort of urban agriculture projects that create livable-wage jobs.

That was the kind of effort underway at the next stop — a farm on the grounds of Pasadena’s Muir High School that was as wild and lush and loud as the Jonathan Club garden was tidy, crisp and quiet.

At Muir Ranch, roses bloomed and sunflowers blared and squashes bigger than bowling balls grew under enormous leaves.

Mud Baron, the goateed project director, wore flip-flops, sunglasses and a brown cap that said “GROW!” in big green letters. On the belt of his jeans was a leather holster keeping his pruners at the ready.

He spoke of the farm’s community-supported agriculture program, in which people subscribe to get weekly flowers or boxes of fresh produce. How much of what’s in the selection comes from the farm, but he also buys from other local farmers, thus helping support them. How, contrary to its reputation, Pasadena has many people in need, including many Muir families. How getting young people interested in the garden was one way to push them toward better futures.

Looking out over the rows of vegetables and flowers, he pointed to a young man who was helping set up a long table for lunch. Manny, he said, now 20, had gotten training in the garden, learning how to plant and install irrigation systems. He’d also learned about flowers and had just done all the flowers for a wedding, earning $20 an hour.

“At the heart of what I’m trying to do is to teach these kids to be entrepreneurs,” said Baron, who then talked of further plans — for a food truck run by students and a charter school centered on making things — that would teach kids how to grow vegetables, how to pickle, how to weld benches and how “to really do something.”

A catered lunch in the garden came next, featuring salads of kale and quinoa. Baron clipped flowers and arranged them like headdresses, which he got the visitors to place on their heads. He took photographs. Everyone laughed.

 

These two projects, L.A. Prep and L.A. Kitchen, certainly sounded exciting, but they were almost too much to process at once on such a bountiful day.

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In honor of Veterans Day tomorrow, CDFA presents an encore presentation of “From Service to Harvest,” a story from the Growing California video series of veterans turning to farming after their service is complete.

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California produces one half of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables and is also the largest dairy producing state. Yet in California, the nation’s largest agricultural producer, one in four children and one in six adults regularly go hungry. Join the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the California Association of Food Banks, and CA Grown  in combating hunger. This is why December is ‘Farm to Food Bank Month’. It is an opportunity to not only recognize the great work that is occurring on an ongoing basis – Ag Against Hunger, Hidden Harvest, Young Farmers and Ranchers, and Farm to Family – but also provides a chance for California farm families to give back to their communities. For a look at how this helps needy families, please view a video from our Growing California series at the bottom of this post.

CDFA is working in collaboration with its State Board of Food and Agriculture to try to increase annual farm-to-food bank donations to 200 million pounds by next year.

Help join the cause and participate at our upcoming Farm to Food Bank event on Wednesday, December 3^rd from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the Second Harvest Food Bank in San Jose.  Let’s work to end hunger in California!

For those within the agricultural family, please consider making a product donation or a 2015 future food pledge today – contact Steve Linkhart, California Association of Food Bank  at (510) 350-9916.

For our foodie friends and food lovers – tweet, Instagram or Facebook  – #CAGrown with a pic of California Grown produce and a pound of food will be donated to a local food bank. A tweet a day is all we ask…

The next segment in the Growing California video series, a partnership with California Grown, is “Urban Growth,” a story about improving food access in the Southern California community of Compton.

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By Neela Banerjee

Climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels is already affecting life on every continent and in the oceans, and the window is closing rapidly for governments to avert the worst damage expected to occur later this century, scientists warned in one of the loudest alarms yet sounded by the international scientific community.

The report, (issued Sunday November 2), arrives as international negotiators prepare to meet in Lima, Peru, in December to establish parameters for an eventual agreement on cutting heat-trapping emissions, a goal that has eluded the international community since talks began more than 20 years ago on the necessity of action. Negotiators are aiming to sign a deal in Paris in December 2015.

Written by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which regularly reviews and synthesizes the latest climate research, the report says there are more heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere than at any time in at least the last 800,000 years, and that most of them came from the combustion of fossil fuels since the advent of widespread industrialization in the late 1800s. The effects of global warming are already being felt in rising sea levels, ocean acidification and more extreme weather events, especially heat waves and droughts, which have begun to affect crop yields and water availability.

The steps taken so far by countries to reduce or mitigate emissions are not enough, the scientists said, and under the business-as-usual scenario, the world runs the risk of consequences so grave that they are irreversible and cannot be adapted to.

“Without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place today, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread and irreversible impacts globally,” the report says.

The IPCC assessment is one of the bluntest to date after years of reports that have warned the global community about climate change. Actions by the world’s governments over the next year will reveal whether the science has ignited meaningful action on cutting emissions. In crafting the report, a key summary of findings that would have made it easier to understand was cut because the governments that sign off on the document could not agree on what should be included. That raises questions about whether they can agree on something much more complex, such as reductions in pollution.

“This is the strongest statement yet of the risks of climate change and the steps we need to take,” said Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University. “But at what point does the stridency of the report affect policymaking, so that we take steps commensurate with the risks? Will it change the debate in Peru and in Paris?”

In the United States, proponents of cutting heat-trapping emissions welcomed the forceful report.

“We can’t prevent a large-scale disaster if we don’t heed this kind of hard science,” said Secretary of State John F. Kerry. “The longer we are stuck in a debate over ideology and politics, the more the costs of inaction grow and grow.”

Two weeks ago, the State Department’s top climate envoy, Todd Stern, said the U.S. was considering a proposal to combat climate change that would require countries to offer plans for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions on a certain schedule but would leave it to individual nations to determine how deep their cuts would be.

Earlier approaches taken by the international community to mandate certain levels of emission cuts got little buy-in from large polluters such as the United States and China. But some countries fear that with the approach the U.S. now backs, countries will not make the kinds of reductions needed to keep the average global temperature from rising beyond 2 degrees on the Celsius scale, or 3.6 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, from pre-industrial levels. The 2-degrees-Celsius threshold is the point beyond which scientists estimate certain catastrophic, irreversible changes would occur.

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